Remember Carlos Vigil

A couple of weeks or maybe months from now there will be another kid something like Carlos Vigil for us to embrace in a cleansing outpouring of cultural compassion. There will be someone new to offer up as an example of a world gone insane. But tonight there is only Carlos Vigil. There is only his story, because his story is the story of every one of the kids still to come. The kids who will be bullied to death.

A couple of weeks or maybe months from now there will be another kid something like Carlos Vigil for us to embrace in a cleansing outpouring of cultural compassion. There will be someone new to offer up as an example of a world gone insane. But tonight there is only Carlos Vigil. There is only his story, because his story is the story of every one of the kids still to come. The kids who will be bullied to death.

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This past Saturday, 17-year-old Carlos Vigil of Albuquerque, New Mexico committed suicide. He had dedicated his teenage years to being an advocate against bullying, a subject he knew all too well, as he'd been mercilessly bullied most of his life for his weight, his acne, his glasses, and mostly, the fact that he was gay. His suicide note came in the form of one final message posted to Twitter.

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It's difficult to even express real outrage or feel real heartbreak anymore if we're not closely, personally impacted by an event that might induce it. In the internet era, we're so inundated with causes to fight for and offenses to stand against and people to raise up onto our shoulders or tear down and kick hard because they've done good or bad; after a while it all becomes a blur and we become cynical and desensitized to what years ago would have stuck in our brains or hearts and stayed there for longer than a news cycle, what would have had a truly lasting impact on us. If you want to stay sane these days, you have to learn to detach at least somewhat and not let everything get to you for the simple reason that there's just so much out there to get to you now.

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Tomorrow there will be a thousand new tragedies we'll read about, a thousand new traumas strobed at us that someone somewhere expects us to be angry about or grief-stricken over. There will be names our culture will latch onto, common enemies it will abhor, victims it will rally around. They will preoccupy us for a time then be gone to make way for the next fascination. No matter how sincere we are in our emotional effusion, it's an evanescent thing that can be transplanted onto a new host over and over again, often without our even realizing it's happening. As long as we're connected to an entire world well outside our front door, we'll likely never run out of things to concern ourselves with even if each is only temporary.

I suppose what I'm saying is that a couple of weeks or maybe months from now there will be another kid something like Carlos Vigil for us to embrace in a cleansing outpouring of cultural compassion. There will be someone new to offer up as an example of a world gone insane and to mourn as a needless victim of senseless violence and a lack of understanding that led to a complete loss of hope for the future. We'll see this kind of thing again. We'll see another young person bullied to the point where he or she feels like the only recourse left is to lay down and die. There will be more suicide notes. More devastated families. More friends left behind to ask why. There will be more expressions of anguish and frustration from those who somehow survived the lifetime of abuse that claimed that latest kid, that kid who decided that he or she simply couldn't survive it -- didn't want to.

There will be more.

But tonight, even though those other young people -- those children -- are already out there, the dead walking among us, there is only Carlos Vigil. There is only his story, because his story is the story of every one of those kids. The tortured life he led is in so many ways the same life those who came before him suffered through -- the ones who gave up too soon, perhaps convinced not only that things would never get better but that they didn't deserve for things to get better -- and it will ultimately be the same life those who follow his path into the darkness suffer through. The existence they feel they desperately need to escape because even not existing would be better. The life that already feels like death.

Carlos's mother tells a story about how when he was eight-years-old he had a lunchbox with a big smiley face on it. The kids would tease him about it. They'd call him names. One day, they grabbed the lunchbox and smashed it against the ground, breaking it apart. That was how it started, she said, and it never relented from there. Carlos was a little boy with a smiley face lunchbox -- and that's why he deserved to be made fun of and abused. Carlos was a chubby, awkward kid with glasses -- and that's why he deserved to be made fun of and abused. Carlos was a teenager with acne -- and that's why he deserved to be made fun of and abused. Carlos was gay -- and that's why he deserved to be made fun of and abused. He wasn't like everybody else -- but in reality he was exactly like everybody else. He had a mother and a father, and friends, and a future, and dreams that could have come true.

He had so much. He had so much to live for.

Carlos was loved. He deserved to be loved. He deserved to grow to realize that. He deserved to live. He deserved to be who he was, because who he was was incredible, even if he went to his grave never knowing it. That is far and away the biggest tragedy in all of this, in the untimely end to his far-too-short life: that he had no idea how great he was. How great he always was and how great he was always going to be.

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In May of 1980, for days on end, Miami burned. This is the story of the incident that started one of the deadliest and most devastating racial riots in U.S. history. It's a story that's all too familiar.

Any evening that begins with a car on fire is guaranteed to be memorable.That's how things got underway as the darkness draped itself over New York City on Saturday, April 12th, 2008: with Michael Chobot spending the first few minutes of his big 21st birthday celebration staring in disbelief out of the window of the cab we were sitting in the back of as it crawled with traffic past an inferno that maybe ten minutes ago was a car. We were heading downtown, toward the Village, and firefighters had already blocked off the lane with the burning, empty vehicle, backing up the FDR for a good half-mile. While at least one of us in the cab was frustrated as hell at the delay, the sense of little-kid wonder I'd come to expect from Mike was in full bloom once the cause of it was revealed. From where I was sitting I could make out the expression on his face reflected slightly in the window as we passed the scene -- the open mouth forming an awed smile, the wide eyes, the appreciation for the sheer surreality of such a moment. Live long enough in Gotham and you start to believe that you've seen it all, that nothing can return you to that place you were when you knew full-well how wonderfully weird the entire world is. But there was Mike, with all the unpretentious exuberance that something like the sight of a car engulfed in flames, out of nowhere, to kick off your birthday night, should elicit. And at that, I remember cracking a little smile in spite of myself, because if there's one thing you learn from knowing Mike, it's that whatever strange magic it is that he possesses -- the singular way he looks at the world, what makes him him -- it rubs off on you, and that's never a bad thing. The rest of that evening involved, among other things, Mike drunkenly rushing up to me at a bar after having disappeared for a few minutes to tell me that if we were willing to buy a couple of girls he'd just met drinks, they would make out in front of us; Mike being relieved of his leather belt and spanked with it by a bartender at Coyote Ugly; and the night's master of ceremonies, a good friend of mine, nearly being arrested for public urination. The following morning, I was awakened from unconsciousness by Mike standing there holding up the now very soiled blanket that I'd laid out on the couch for him the night before; he asked me, completely sincerely, with a goofy smile on his face that only served to ratify his perceived innocence, "Hey, man -- why'd you give me a blanket with vomit all over it?" I threw the thing in the laundry, we ordered a couple of Irish breakfasts from a place up the street and spent the rest of the day learning how to jump cars off the roofs of buildings in Grand Theft Auto IV. It was, even during that heady period in my life, with a new baby on the way, one of the best times I could remember. I had taken my wife's kid brother, whom I'd known for six years, out to christen his adulthood and we'd both had an absolute blast.That's my favorite memory of Michael Chobot, my favorite among many memories. It doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of who he is and what makes him unlike anyone I've ever known, truly unlike anyone period, but right now it's what I've got. And those closest to Mike are doing the same thing I'm doing right now: quietly but hurriedly gathering these memories like diamonds spilled across a floor and holding tightly to each one. They're doing this because soon it's all any of us will have. Soon, Michael will be gone.For almost two full years now, Mike has put up a truly remarkable fight against one of the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet: acute myeloid leukemia. He's been in and out of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He's undergone not one but two bone marrow transplants. He's straddled the line between recovery and collapse, gone into remission, then returned to that precipice to dangle precariously again. Throughout it all, his sense of humor and his singular outlook on life -- the life he was battling so valiantly to hold onto -- have never waned. He's had terrible days. He's had times he's wanted to be alone, I have no doubt times when he's wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and drift away from everything and everyone -- to open them and find himself floating freely in the ocean off a sunny beach somewhere, truly alive. But somehow with a strength I can't even begin to imagine he's managed to keep the most important part of himself intact. The Michael his family and friends have always known -- the one I've known for more than ten years, since he was a funny, awkward, endlessly analytical 14-year-old kid -- was still there. Recently, following this latest transplant, which appeared to be holding, Mike took to looking toward the future. Maybe it was that weekend back in 2008 that sold him on a life in New York City, but in the couple of years before being diagnosed, Mike had moved to Brooklyn and was beginning to get some truly impressive work in his chosen field: sound engineering. He worked on Salt, Pokemon, and It's Kind of a Funny Story. He lived payday to payday, like just about everyone starting out in media in New York, and eventually worked on a PBS feature called An Original DUCKumentary. Just a couple of months ago he called me with some incredible news: He'd been nominated for a national Emmy for it -- outstanding music and sound. The ceremony is this coming October. He wanted to go. I joked to him that he needed to leak the fact that he has cancer to the Academy -- possibly get the sympathy vote. Maybe it's the fact that I'm 3,000 miles away from him and only know what I hear in his voice when we talk on the phone, but I think I finally put out of my mind the ugly reality that had always clawed at my insides. Maybe all of us pulling for him were right: Michael was special. He had taught himself piano as a child. He had an artistic streak most could only dream of. He had a strangely old-soul quality about him, becoming a teenage fanboy of music that was popular on rock radio even before I was a teen (so much so that I used to rib him pretty mercilessly about it). He was almost supernaturally optimistic. He seemed to control everything around him, bending life to his will without really even trying, always improving it -- or at least making it a hell of a lot more interesting. He couldn't be taken. It simply wasn't possible. He existed in a perpetual state of grace. He was gonna be fine. But two weeks ago, he was given the news: there was nothing the doctors could do anymore. The cancer had come back with a vengeance. It was too aggressive. Too powerful. He wasn't going to make it. He's not going to make it. He's home now. With the family he loves more than anything and which loves him with equal ferocity. He's at peace with what's to come. How do you mourn for what never existed? How do you grieve not for the past but for the future, a future that will never be? I suppose that's what true grief is -- it's not the disappearance of what was there all along as much as it is the sudden absence of what you were so sure was to come. It's the worst kind of cliché, but Michael Chobot was going to change the world. He was going to do something not simply great but truly monumental. I can't even begin to explain how I know this, but it's as certain to me as the searing knowledge that the man who isn't my blood brother but who embraced me as one and has grown to become an inextricable part of my heart and soul is now dying. The only comfort I or anyone else close to him can take is that he's already accomplished such extraordinary things, had so indelible an impact on so many lives, created love as effortlessly as he created sound and music and film, equally beautiful and without question immortal. There's little anyone can do at this point other than to assure Mike that what he's done with his life has mattered. That in just a little over a quarter-century on this planet, he fulfilled every bit of his promise to himself and those around him. That he made a difference. That he can be proud. Michael is my brother and my friend. I will go to my own grave loving him. I will make sure my daughter, his niece, grows up knowing how fortunate she is that her uncle was the man he was. She'll learn the stories about Mike, hear them repeated endlessly. The hilarious stories, the unusual stories, the profoundly moving stories. She'll hear the stories from his brother, and his sisters, and his grandparents, and his friends, and every single person whose life he's touched.Maybe I was wrong. Maybe everyone who's known Michael Chobot throughout the years won't be left with only memories once he's gone. What they'll be left with is what Mike himself gave them, what he gave me: something better. Michael made our lives better. He has since the day he was born -- and his legacy will ensure that he'll continue to long after his physical presence is no more. He always had fire. He was guaranteed to be memorable.

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